TI's Templeton Reviews DLP Market At CES

Using a “This Is Your Life” theme to demonstrate how Texas Instruments technologies have impacted the CE consumer, TI's CEO Richard Templeton took attendees at his International CES keynote through a tour of where TI chips and technology are now, and where they're headed.

In the here and now, Templeton was joined by NFL Hall of Famer and former Oakland Raider Howie Long to hail the success of TI's DLP display technology against its flat-panel rivals.

“It took five years, from 1996 to 2001, to ship our first million DLP units and then another three years to ship an additional two million units,” Templeton said. “Things really accelerated when we got into the rear-projection HDTV market. We've shipped an additional two million units in just the past eight months.”

Templeton said that future improvements to the technology would “push television to the point that you cannot distinguish the recreated image from reality.”

Long, who compared his move from Villanova University to the Raiders as like “going from a monastery to Rahway Prison,” noted the rapid advance of HD programming, particularly in sports broadcasting.

“It's just a matter of time” before 1,080p resolution broadcasting appears, Long predicted before attempting to abscond with a DLP projector.

Templeton then highlighted his company's DLP Cinema projection technology, trotting out CES keynote veteran and Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, fresh from his guest appearance earlier in the day with HP's CEO Carly Fiorina. Katzenberg praised the digital revolution's impact on animation and said the next mountain to scale was digitally distributing and displaying content in theaters to beat back competition from improving home theaters.

“One of the things that will happen I think in reasonably short order will be a broadly available exhibition of movies in 3D, not as a gimmick but as an immersive movie-going experience unreplicateable in your home,” Katzenberg said.

If consumers hunger for mobile content, Templeton noted that by 2007 — if not sooner — “cellphones will use TI's new Hollywood chip to receive and display digital broadcast TV, so you could link your phone to this projector and it's a portable big-screen digital TV.”

Blake Krikorian, CEO of Sling Media, then joined Templeton on stage to demo his company's SlingBox product which takes in a TV signal (analog or digital) and “spits it out” as an IP signal to a number of different devices. Using the SlingBox, consumers could access TV shows saved on a TiVo on their laptop or cellular phone anywhere in the world, Krikorian said.